The sooner Apple or somebody else provides a viable alternative to this crapheap of slow old OS9 code, the better

I can't believe it's still carbon .. it's slow and a TOTAL MEMORY USEAGE DISASTER ZONE

You are gravely mistaken. Carbon is not slower than Cocoa, nor does it use more RAM. I don't know about Snow Leopard, but in Leopard and earlier, some of the MacOS X Cocoa frame works run on top of Carbon. QuickTime and menu management come to mind.

This begs the question - how far back should a company go to support new operating systems from Apple? One version? Two versions? Or is it time? Six months? One year? Does price of the upgrade play into this?

I just can't see upgrading to Snow Leopard in a professional environment for AT LEAST another year anyway. That gives CS3 some life yet and those using it plenty of time to save up for CS4/5.

Adobe knows that CS4 has been less than a runaway success, and it's buggy enough (still!) to make people want to hold off on using it until it is completely stable, even if that means not upgrading the OS. There is NO compelling reason, after all, to even upgrade to Leopard for a lot of places, let alone Snow Leopard. Many places still have multiple G5s that work just fine. So until there is a massive change to Intel hardware over the next two to three years, there is little reason to care about CS3 on Snow Leopard.

This statement is probably a well thought out Adobe strategy to increase users to update. Has anyone tried CS3 in the pre release Snow Kitty yet? I doubt it would have any problems but I could be wrong.

From Apple ][ - to new Mac Pro I've owned them all.Long on AAPL so biased"Google doesn't sell you anything, Google just sells you!"

So until there is a massive change to Intel hardware over the next two to three years, there is little reason to care about CS3 on Snow Leopard.

Umm...there are other more important reasons some of us are upgrading to Snow Leopard besides Photoshop. Final Cut Studio 3 performance improvements anyone? Photoshop CS3 is just a tool that I use in addition to FCS 3. If it stops working, I will seek alternatives until CS5 is out. Not worth it for me to upgrade to CS4.

I can only think that this is part of an overall policy to make people update to a version that has little added value for an exorbitant price.

This was confirmed recently when I updated my Canon camera - now there is no Adobe RAW update for this camera in CS3 and I have to convert all CR2 files to PNG before I can even edit. Having spent £600 on a new camera, Adobe now expect me to spend another £500+ on CS4 to see my photos!!!

I may be misunderstanding you here, but wouldn't Aperture be a solution for you.

From Apple ][ - to new Mac Pro I've owned them all.Long on AAPL so biased"Google doesn't sell you anything, Google just sells you!"

This makes me glad I decided to stick with the last Macromedia Suite (I use FireWorks extensively) and not upgrade to either CS3 or CS4. Sure, I have to run it in Rosetta, but frankly I haven't seen where Adobe has improved things enough to justify the switch.

This kind of tomfoolery, abandoning a huge installed user base -- especially with a relatively recent product -- is just inexcusable for a corporation as ubiquitous as Adobe. Not every small business out there has $600 per seat to drop every two years.

Maybe I ought to spend some of that money on a PayPal donation to help get The Gimp for Mac up to par.

If you have any memory of the recent evolution of OS X, Adobe has bent over backwards for this platform:

2000 - 2002: Migration of suite from OS 9 to OS X, a completely new OS.

2005-2006: Migration from PPC/Codeweaver to Universal/Xcode. This required changing not just their code base, but their entire development process, using a yet unproven tool: XCode. They even helped Apple improve XCode during this process.

2008- Sorry, Adobe, we changed our mind: no 64-bit Carbon. This forced Adobe to move their entire suite to Cocoa for CS5.

They are doing a remarkable job keeping up with these changes in the course of their regular upgrade cycle. I think things will finally settle down for them, as there is not much left that Apple can do to them, but they have had a rough nine years supporting a huge, complex suite on the Mac platform. We should all be thankful they didn't give up or simply skip major releases on the Mac.

Just a question; wouldn't the tools Apple now provide to developers for Snow Kitty conversion be of any help to Adobe with CS3 or is there a technical problem preventing this?

From Apple ][ - to new Mac Pro I've owned them all.Long on AAPL so biased"Google doesn't sell you anything, Google just sells you!"

This makes me glad I decided to stick with the last Macromedia Suite (I use FireWorks extensively) and not upgrade to either CS3 or CS4. Sure, I have to run it in Rosetta, but frankly I haven't seen where Adobe has improved things enough to justify the switch.

This kind of tomfoolery, abandoning a huge installed user base -- especially with a relatively recent product -- is just inexcusable for a corporation as ubiquitous as Adobe. Not every small business out there has $600 per seat to drop every two years.

Maybe I ought to spend some of that money on a PayPal donation to help get The Gimp for Mac up to par.

I have long wished Apple would add to their pro suit line up, both vector and a pixel based graphics applications (or even one to do both) to replace the need for PS and Illustrator.

From Apple ][ - to new Mac Pro I've owned them all.Long on AAPL so biased"Google doesn't sell you anything, Google just sells you!"

Gustav, try to read before you post !
You're right though .. Carbon is not necessarily slower, but let's face it .. it probably is slower .. and definitely is less flexible - why else is it being depricated ?

Whether carbon uses more RAM, in inconsequential .. The fact is that photoshop gobbles many GB's of RAM and disk resource to apply a simple transform. Do a transform real-time in Preview with the same image .. hey .. no problem !

I don't care if it's carbon or somebody left a bunch of space invader code in there -- just fix it already !

Adobe Photoshop's memory management is atrocious .. I am not suggesting this is related to Carbon, but I wouldn't rule it out either

Now I'm tired of it .. and I want an alternative

Microsoft have fallen into the same ditch .. yep let's just milk the old code till we have to change it .. well too late !

I really dont expect (and can't) pay every 18 months for essentially the same warmed over old code. Some comments here are bang-on .. iphoto and preview do the basics better than photoshop .. it's old and tired .. and it's time for change

Just a question; wouldn't the tools Apple now provide to developers for Snow Kitty conversion be of any help to Adobe with CS3 or is there a technical problem preventing this?

I think Adobe focuses on upcoming versions as opposed to patching older versions when the OS platforms change. However, there should be no ground-shaking platform, OS, or development environment changes on the Mac for the foreseeable future, so maybe it will be less of a strain on Adobe to start offering patches for previous versions when new Mac OS versions come out.

I think Adobe focuses on upcoming versions as opposed to patching older versions when the OS platforms change. However, there should be no ground-shaking platform, OS, or development environment changes on the Mac for the foreseeable future, so maybe it will be less of a strain on Adobe to start offering patches for previous versions when new Mac OS versions come out.

Man I'm good. From John Nack's blog today:

"[Update: No one said anything about CS3 being "not supported" on Snow Leopard. The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation.]"

And more from the horse's mouth (blogs.adobe.com) (note that Adobe isn't nearly as opaque as Apple):

"Think of what fixing something [in CS3] would mean: all your engineers (QE and Dev) haven't touched that code/processes in 3+ years and have been working on 2 generations ahead. You'd have to stop work on CS5, have a huge paradigm shift to look at the older code/tools/problems, frustrate all your engineering staff doing that (no one wants to look back at bugs they already fixed), reconfigure build machines and test machines (remember Apple's dev tools are tied to OS releases, so to build CS3 you'd have to setup Tiger Machines to build, using old versions of XCode, and debugging can't be native so you must use painful remote debugging, etc.). When you think about it, it quickly becomes impractical. Basically, the choice is fixes for CS3, costs for the switch backwards would probably well into the 8 figure dollar amounts, and a 6 month delay for CS5 (with an even higher lost opportunity costs), all for the chance to gain no additional revenue and have an investor revolt and stock value plummet, while your current customers leave in frustration because it takes you much longer between releases... or... since you can't fix anything that breaks in CS3, why bother to test much?

If this was your company, which would you choose: (1) Focus on making the best products that you can and making most of your current and future customers happy -or- (2) focus on old products, using old tools and technology, to make your out-of-date customers happy?"

Now using cs 2 & 3 on differnent machines.
Will be interesting to see how buggy they get on 10.5...

Just as an example, nothing personal:

If I asked you to develope my website, and we agreed on spec and price, and you supplied a product I was happy with; would you feel obliged, when 18months later I update my hardware, or some function of the site, to carry on updating your site because of changes I want to make to the spec? Would you expect to be paid?

it really doesn't take much to recoup the cost for the upgrade. i just finished a job that took care of that. my priorities probably aren't that much different than most on these threads. yes, it's terribly slow job-wise out there, and i'm having to work a couple of jobs for utw, but you make due with what you have.

do you people want the upgrade for free? if you want to continue using cs3, keep running it on leopardit's a perfectly viable os and everything works fine. if you HAVE to have snow leopard, run it on your primary drive with the knowledge that it's not going to be supported, or get another drive. as someone on this thread posted, no obvious problems running cs3 on sl.

i believe not having what you want, when you want it, is part of the maturation process. we fan boys are always telling pc users that they don't have to buy apple. you guys don't have to upgrade to cs4. no one's twisting your arm.

I bought CS3 about two months before CS4 was announced. Got screwed then. Now, they're dropping support for CS3. Getting screwed again.

If I recall at the time, you could have upgraded to the CS4 for less than $200 or even nothing. Whatever it was, the difference in price, was more significant than in the increased power and functionality that the new suite offered.

Just how do you expect Adobe to support CS3 on Snow Leopard baffles me. CS3 wasn't programmed for dual core 64-bit processing?